Excerpts Thread

raah!

It's about time we've had a thread of this nature round these parts.

So you can stick in here excerpts from what you are reading or have read for other people to enjoy, preferably ones that do not "make aspects of the plot explicit" (points to whoever catches where this 'excerpt' comes from).

I'll be back later tonight with some excerpts when my house is less noisy.

turgon

The river Thames: "What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires."

Colonialism: "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have different complexion or flatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it. What redeems it is the idea only."

"We live, as we dream, alone."

turgon

[The preceding chapter has been describing how food and land cannot be given to the needy because profits will fall]

"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree row, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates - died of malnutrition - because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slopped down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

raah!

This extract captures a small part of why selifan is one of my favourite characters from the novel. Couldn't fit in his whole drunken discourse with his horses, but heres an extract from near the end of it:

Seilifan, flourishing the whip struck up a song that was not exactly a song but something so drawn out that there was no end to it. Everything went into it: all the shotus of approbation and reprobation with which horses are regaled throughout the lenght and breadth of Russia ; adjectives of all kinds, without further discrimination, just as they first fell from the tongue. In such manner things reached the point where he finally began calling them 'secretaries'.

And here's a description of The Postmaster

However, he was a wit, flowery in his language, and fond of larding his speech, as he put it. And he larded his speech with a great many parenthetical expressions, such as 'My dear sir, something or other of the sort, you know, you understand, you can picture, relatively speaking, so to say, in a certain fashion,' and others which he poured out by the sackful. He also larded his speech rather effectively with a winking and squinting of one eye, all of which imparted a highly caustic tone to many of his satirical innuendos.

turgon

[in the preceding chapter Tokien has been describing how the armies of Mordor have been successfully attacking the city of Minas Tirith and are likely to take the city.]

"Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the city, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, reckoning nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns horns. In dark Mindolluin's sides they dimply echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last."

From The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, Book 5 chapter IV.



"Thingol looked in silence upon Lúthien; and he thought in his heart ... 'Bring to me in your [Beren's] hand a Silmaril from Morgoth's crown; and then, if she will, Lúthien may set her hand in yours.'

But Beren laughed. 'For little price,' he said, 'do Elven-kings sell their daughters: for gems, and things made by craft.' "

From The Silmarilion, chapter 19 - "Of Beren and Luthien,"

Poppy78

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

From Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson.

It is easy to write Thompson off as a raving druggie lunatic but he could write. He expresses in a beautifully lyrical way the zeitgeist of his generation. Imagine what he could have done if he wasn't so mashed all the time.

turgon

One of the themes in Frankenstein is how the acquisition of knowledge can bring woe due to higher expectations from life.

"If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows, and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us."

"Oh that I had for ever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat!
Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling; but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain and that was death."

turgon

"'They're trying to kill me,' Yossarian told him calmly.
'No ones trying to kill you,' Clevinger cried.
'Then why are they shooting at me?' Yossarian asked.
'They're shooting at everyone,' Clevinger answered. 'Theyre trying to kill everyone.'
'And what difference does that make?'"

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle."

Eliot Rosewater

Within this book Vonnegut puts forward a whole kind of philosophy on how to deal with life. This philosophy was inspired by how tiny and minute he felt in WW2, leading him to believe he could not worry about the past as his life was insignificant in terms of the whole world. The philosophy is called being "unstuck" in time, and is effectively that you have no control over your life:

Chapter 2 wrote:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

The this quote is combined with the biblical verse to suggest an attitude towards dealing with he past:

Chapter 3 wrote:

Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy's wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference." Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

Perhaps the most touching thing about this book is that Vonnegut never openly says he is trying to deal with the past (I think) and yet in my opinion thats what the books about.

Eliot Rosewater

This quote compares the pride of the aristocratic Compson family to the mentally-retarded Benjy. It's hard to contextualize it; maybe readers of the book will like it.

"I haven't got much pride, I cant afford it with a kitchenful of **** to feed and robbing the state asylum of its star freshman. Blood, I says, governors and generals. It's a damn good thing we never had any kings and presidents; we'd all be down there at Jackson chasing butterflies."

William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury.


Any more folks? :pac:

tyler71

Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the worlds great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.

'A river runs through it' Norman Maclean

Denerick

Because I'm bored, and its too early to go to sleep:

Aldous Huxley, 'Point Counter Point'

"It's a hypothesis," said Walter, wishing uncomfertably that Burlap had never read the New Testament.
"For me", retorted Burlap, "Its a certainty. An absolute certainty." He spoke very emphatically, he wagged his head with violence. "A complete and absolute certainty", he repeated, hypnotising himself by the reiteration of the phrase into a fictitious passion of conviction. "Complete and absolute" He was silent, but within he continued to lash himself into mystical fury.

Patrick Kavanagh, 'The Green Fool'

Standing on the top of one of my little hills one day in May I looked across at the sun-flecked plains of Louth and Meath and knew how fine a thing it was to be alive. The green fields and the simple homes and the twisty primitive folk told me of the unchanging beauty of Ireland. At my feet were primroses and violets, a magic carpet on which I could journey over the Baghdads of dreamland.

In the hollow a man was hoeing potatoes. Now and then he would look my way and I knew he was slightly angry with me. He thought me a lazy good for nothing.

As usual my reverie was violently disturbed by one of the men who appear so innocent at a distance, and at close range are savage godless creatures.

"What the hell are ye dramin' about?" he shouted in a harsh voice.

Aviva_Lasvagas

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

A.E. Houseman (Alfred Edward)
From A Shropshire Lad

Eliot Rosewater

This is far from a quotation in the usual sense; rather it is the (touching) dedication to Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, a book based on totalitarianism in 1930's Russia and the Show Trials.

The characters in this books are fictitious.
The historical circumstances which determined their
actions are real. The life of the man
NS Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number
of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials.
Several of them were personally known
to the author. This book is dedicated
to their memory.

Dedications are rarely striking, so I thought this was worth sharing.

Hermy

From Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs:

Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand, charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of uncontested police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for the raw materials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams.

Paddy Samurai

Love this book ,i have read it a good few times.

Long cobwebs of aromatic smoke were strung across the room, and Duffy fanned the air with a little portfolio of prints. "It's getting murky in here," he complained. "You're right," the old man said. "I'm a damnable host. Perhaps if I open it a crack ..." He walked to the window, stared out of it for a moment, and then turned back to Duffy with an apologetic smile. "No, I won't open it. Let me explain quickly why I called you in, and then you can be on your way before the fumes begin seriously to annoy you. I've mentioned the Zimmermann Inn, of which I am the owner; it's a popular establishment, but I travel constantly and, to be frank, there is often trouble with the customers that I can't control even when I'm there. You know-a wandering friar will get into an argument with some follower of this Luther, a bundschuh leftover from the Peasants' War will knife the Lutheran, and in no time at all the dining room's a shambles and the serving girls are in tears. And these things cut into the profits in a big way-damages, nice customers scared off, tapsters harder to hire. I need a man who can be there all the time, who can speak to most customers in their native languages, and who can break up a deadly fight without killing anybody-as you did just now, with the Gritti boys by the canal."
Duffy smiled. "You want me to be your bouncer."
"Exactly," agreed Aurelianus, rubbing his hands together.
"Hm." Duffy drummed his fingers on the table top. "You know, if you'd asked me two days ago, I'd have told you to forget it. But ... just in the last couple of days Venice has grown a little tiresome. I admit I've even found myself missing old Vienna. Just last night I had a dream?"
Aurelianus raised his eyebrows innocently. "Oh?"
"Yes, about a girl I used to know there. I wouldn't really mind seeing her-seeing what she's doing now. And if I hang around here those three Gritti lads will be challenging me to a real combat in the official champ clos, and I'm too old for that kind of thing."
"They probably would," Aurelianus agreed. "They're hot-headed young men."
"You know them?"
"No. I know about them." Aurelianus picked up his half-consumed snake and relit it. "I know about quite a number of people," he added, almost to himself, "without actually knowing them. I prefer it that way. You'll take the job, then?"
Oh, what the hell, Duffy thought. I would never have fit in back in Dingle anyway, realistically speaking. He shrugged. "Yes. Why not?"
"Ah. I was hoping you would. You're more suited for it than anyone I've met." He knotted his hands behind his back and paced about the cluttered room. "I've got business in the south, but I'd appreciate it if you could start for Vienna tout de suite. I'll give you some travelling money and a letter of introduction to the Zimmermann brewmaster, an old fellow named Gambrinus. I'll instruct him to give you another lump sum when you arrive there. How soon do you think that can be?"
Duffy scratched his gray head. "Oh, I don't know. What's today?"
"The twenty-fourth of February. Ash Wednesday."
"That's right. Moncio had a gray cross on his forehead. Let's see-I'd take a boat to Trieste, buy a horse and cross the tail end of the Alps just east of there. Then maybe I'd hitch a ride north with some Hungarian lumber merchant; there's usually no lack of them in those parts. Cross the Sava and the Drava, and then follow the old Danube west to Vienna. Say roughly a month."
"Before Easter, without a doubt?" Aurelianus asked anxiously.
"Oh, certainly."
"Good. That's when we open the casks of bock, and I don't want a riot in the place."
"Yes, I'll have been there a good two weeks by then."

Monkeybonkers

"She was talking to everybody. She's part of that dopey culture. Yap, yap, yap. Part of this generation that is proud of its shallowness. The sincere performance is everything. Sincere and empty, totally empty. The sincerity that goes in all directions. The sincerity that is worse than falseness, and the innocence that is worse than corruption. All the rapacity hidden under the sincerity. And under the lingo. This wonderful language that they all have - that they appear to believe - about their 'lack of self-worth,' all the while what they actually believe is that they're entitled to everything. Their shamelessnesses they call lovingness, and the ruthlessness is camouflaged as lost 'self-esteem.' Hitler lacked self-esteem too.That was his problem. It's a con these kids have going. The hyperdramatization of the pettiest emotions. Relationship. My relationship. Clarify my relationship. They open their mouths and they send me up the wall. Their whole language is a summation of the stupidity of the last forty years. Closure. There's one. My students cannot stay in that place where thinking must occur. Closure! They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end - every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliché. Any kid who says 'closure' I flunk. They want closure, there's their closure."




Philip Roth socks it to the 'yoof' of today in The Human Stain. I'd imagine he's not a big fan of Paris Hilton and her ilk!

Hermy

This is one of my favourite passages and one I've re-read many times.
It's from The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and it describes Howard Roarks first meeting with Henry Cameron.

Howard Roark looked at the Dana Building beyond the windows, stopping at each landing, as he mounted the six flights of stairs to Henry Cameron’s office; the elevator was out of order. The stairs had been painted a dirty file-green a long time ago; a little of the paint remained to grate under shoe soles in crumbling patches. Roark went up swiftly, as if he had an appointment, a folder of his drawings under his arm, his eyes on the Dana Building. He collided once with a man descending the stairs; this had happened to him often in the last two days; he had walked through the streets of the city, his head thrown back, noticing nothing but the buildings of New York.
In the dark cubby-hole of Cameron’s anteroom stood a desk with a telephone and a typewriter. A gray-haired skeleton of a man sat at the desk, in his shirt sleeves, with a pair of limp suspenders over his shoulders. He was typing specifications intently, with two fingers and incredible speed. The light from a feeble bulb made a pool of yellow on his back, where the damp shirt stuck to his shoulder blades. The man raised his head slowly, when Roark entered. He looked at Roark, said nothing and waited, his old eyes weary, unquestioning, incurious.
"I should like to see Mr. Cameron," said Roark.
"Yeah?" said the man, without challenge, offense or meaning.
"About what?"
"About a job."
"What job?"
"Drafting."
The man sat looking at him blankly. It was a request that had not confronted him for a long time. He rose at last, without a word, shuffled to a door behind him and went in. He left the door half open. Roark heard him drawling:
"Mr. Cameron, there’s a fellow outside says he’s looking for a job here."
Then a voice answered, a strong, clear voice that held no tones of age:
"Why, the damn fool! Throw him out...Wait! Send him in!"
The old man returned, held the door open and jerked his head at it silently. Roark went in.
The door closed behind him.
Henry Cameron sat at his desk at the end of a long, bare room. He sat bent forward, his forearms on the desk, his two hands closed before him. His hair and his beard were coal black, with coarse threads of white. The muscles of his short, thick neck bulged like ropes. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbows; the bare arms were hard, heavy and brown. The flesh of his broad face was rigid, as if it had aged by compression. The eyes were dark, young, living. Roark stood on the threshold and they looked at each other across the long room. The light from the air shaft was gray, and the dust on the drafting table, on the few green files, looked like fuzzy crystals deposited by the light.
But on the wall, between the windows, Roark saw a picture. It was the only picture in the room. It was the drawing of a skyscraper that had never been erected. Roark’s eyes moved first and they moved to the drawing. He walked across the office, stopped before it and stood looking at it. Cameron’s eyes followed him, a heavy glance, like a long, thin needle held fast at one end, describing a slow circle, its point piercing Roark’s body, keeping it pinned firmly. Cameron looked at the orange hair, at the hand hanging by his side, its palm to the drawing, the fingers bent slightly, forgotten not in a gesture but in the overture to a gesture of asking or seizing something.
"Well?" said Cameron at last. "Did you come to see me or did you come to look at pictures?" Roark turned to him.
"Both," said Roark. He walked to the desk. People had always lost their sense of existence in Roark’s presence; but Cameron felt suddenly that he had never been as real as in the awareness of the eyes now looking at him.
"What do you want?" snapped Cameron.
"I should like to work for you," said Roark quietly.
The voice said: "I should like to work for you."
The tone of the voice said: "I’m going to work for you."
"Are you?" said Cameron, not realizing that he answered the unpronounced sentence.
"What’s the matter? None of the bigger and better fellows will have you?"
"I have not applied to anyone else."
"Why not? Do you think this is the easiest place to begin? Think anybody can walk in here without trouble? Do you know who I am?"
"Yes. That’s why I’m here."
"Who sent you?"
"No one."
"Why the hell should you pick me?"
"I think you know that."
"What infernal impudence made you presume that I’d want you? Have you decided that I’m so hard up that I’d throw the gates open for any punk who’d do me the honor? ‘Old Cameron,’ you’ve said to yourself, ‘is a has-been, a drunken…’ come on, you’ve said it!…‘a drunken failure who can’t be particular!’ Is that it?...Come on, answer me! Answer me, damn you! What are you staring at? Is that it? Go on! Deny it!"
"It’s not necessary."
"Where have you worked before?"
"I’m just beginning."
"What have you done?"
"I’ve had three years at Stanton."
"Oh? The gentleman was too lazy to finish?"
"I have been expelled."
"Great!" Cameron slapped the desk with his fist and laughed. "Splendid! You’re not good enough for the lice nest at Stanton, but you’ll work for Henry Cameron! You’ve decided this is the place for refuse! What did they kick you out for? Drink? Women? What?"
"These," said Roark, and extended his drawings.
Cameron looked at the first one, then at the next, then at every one of them to the bottom. Roark heard the paper rustling as Cameron slipped one sheet behind another. Then Cameron raised his head. "Sit down." Roark obeyed.
Cameron stared at him, his thick fingers drumming against the pile of drawings.
"So you think they’re good?’ said Cameron. "Well, they’re awful. It’s unspeakable. It’s a crime. Look," he shoved a drawing at Roark’s face, "look at that. What in Christ’s name was your idea? What possessed you to indent that plan here? Did you just want to make it pretty, because you had to patch something together? Who do you think you are? Guy Francon, God help you?...Look at this building, you fool! You get an idea like this and you don’t know what to do with it! You stumble on a magnificent thing and you have to ruin it! Do you know how much you’ve got to learn?"
"Yes. That’s why I’m here."
"And look at that one! I wish I’d done that at your age! But why did you have to botch it? Do you know what I’d do with that? Look, to hell with your stairways and to hell with your furnace room! When you lay the foundations..." He spoke furiously for a long time. He cursed. He did not find one sketch to satisfy him. But Roark noticed that he spoke as of buildings that were in construction. He broke off abruptly, pushed the drawings aside, and put his fist over them.
He asked: "When did you decide to become an architect?"
"When I was ten years old."
"Men don’t know what they want so early in life, if ever. You’re lying."
"Am I?"
"Don’t stare at me like that! Can’t you look at something else? Why did you decide to be an architect?"
"I didn’t know it then. But it’s because I’ve never believed in God."
"Come on, talk sense."
"Because I love this earth. That’s all I love. I don’t like the shape of things on this earth. I want to change them."
"For whom?"
"For myself."
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-two."
"When did you hear all that?
"I didn’t."
"Men don’t talk like that at twenty-two. You’re abnormal."
"Probably."
"I didn’t mean it as a compliment."
"I didn’t either."
"Got any family?"
"No."
"Worked through school?"
"Yes."
"At what?"
"In the building trades."
"How much money have you got left?"
"Seventeen dollars and thirty cents."
"When did you come to New York?"
"Yesterday."
Cameron looked at the white pile under his fist.
"God damn you," said Cameron softly.
"God damn you!" roared Cameron suddenly, leaning forward. "I didn’t ask you to come here! I don’t need any draftsmen! There’s nothing here to draft! I don’t have enough work to keep myself and my men out of the Bowery Mission! I don’t want any fool visionaries starving around here! I don’t want the responsibility. I didn’t ask for it. I never thought I’d see it again. I’m through with it. I was through with that many years ago. I’m perfectly happy with the drooling dolts I’ve got here, who never had anything and never will have and it makes no difference what becomes of them. That’s all I want. Why did you have to come here? You’re setting out to ruin yourself, you know that, don’t you? And I’ll help you to do it. I don’t want to see you. I don’t like you. I don’t like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You’re impertinent. You’re too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I’d have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure. You’re coming to work here tomorrow at nine o’clock sharp."
"Yes," said Roark, rising.
"Fifteen dollars a week. That’s all I can pay you."
"Yes."
"You’re a damn fool. You should have gone to someone else. I’ll kill you if you go to anyone else. What’s your name?"
"Howard Roark."
"If you’re late, I’ll fire you."
"Yes." Roark extended his hand for the drawings.
"Leave these here!" bellowed Cameron. "Now get out!"

Eliot Rosewater

"The like of him would have no principles, of course," said Mrs Furrisky.
"Oh, he was a terrible drink of water. Death by fire, you know, by God it's no joke."
"They tell me drowning is worse," Lamont said.
"Do you know what it is," said Furrisky, "you can drown me three times before you roast me. Yes, by God and six. Put your finger in a basin of water. What do you feel? Next to nothing. Put your finger in the fire!"

raah!

I think I may just invest in a copy of "point counter point" thanks to this thread! Aldous huxley is really growing on me.

Here is an entire chapter of moby dick which can be read in isolation from the rest of the book. I'm reading this at the moment and enjoying it immensly. I think this chapter is a wonderful examples of the extended conceits and superior descriptive skills melville displays throughout the book. This is from online literature, it's slightly different from the modern library version I am reading, I would say it's worse, but not too much.

CHAPTER 23

The Lee Shore


Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years' dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!